Ashes
by Cinnamon Plum
Summary: As the plague out of Angband takes the children of Dor-lómin, Huor writes a letter he cannot send to Turgon about what they can't do.


King Turgon –

Hello. I should start off a letter with a greeting, but I don't have the paper for it.

Back when I was in Gondolin I wondered what it was to be a king, and I looked at you and you were all majesty and glory and power. That's not how it works with us: Maybe the Edain never were that way, or maybe it is just that Dor-lómin is different, but Húrin it is who must lead us as a chieftain. I am in his house right now; it is nothing like the spires of Gondolin or the King's Tower. There is very little that's white, and there is no throne, and in any case my brother is not the sort to sit in one, or to sit down ever. He's the head of the House of Hador, so he's very busy.

The Dark Enemy is very busy, so Húrin is very busy.

I'm writing because there's nothing left for me to do or help with here, at least for a moment. There's plenty wrong but there's nothing I can do now but watch and wait. The way you do behind your mountains, nestled in your green valley, waiting for some strategic advantage, some weak point to appear so you can strike. The ones who are dying – I can't stop it, and I've stayed up nights trying to keep my nephew and niece alive and now I'm too exhausted to sleep, and they don't sleep either. You can feel the suffering radiating off of them like the heat of their fevers, and the time I've spent trying to help them and keep the household in order while Húrin deals with the crisis has been too long, too useless. Meanwhile Húrin _cannot_ rest, cannot think of it; even when it's useless he can't stop. He's the lord of our people, and that means when another young woman comes at him with a corpse in her arms and demands her infant back, screaming and crying at once, he doesn't say a thing.

He doesn't mention that his two children lie dying to Morgoth's plague and that he should be there with them, that he loves his daughter and his son as deeply as the mother loved her child. He _can't_.

With Húrin it's more important what he can't do than what he can.

But I don't have to do that, I can sit here and write and use up this damned scarce paper and ink writing a letter to someone I cannot know and could not have ever met. I can't have ever been to Gondolin, nor my brother. We have always been in the endless constant skirmish between the Enemy and us, always losing ground, always taking it back, so now Morgoth takes the children of the House of Hador.

Túrin looks dead; he is my nephew, locked in a dark dream, almost in a battle of wills. He is like his mother, sharp and fiercely proud. You never met Morwen Eledhwen. I cannot describe her, but she is a wife like Húrin not in mood but in conviction, in resolve; they try to hold each other up now when neither, by all rights, should be able to stand at all.

My niece is named Urwen, and she was laughter entirely and has golden hair, like your daughter, like Idril. Now she lies in a bed not sleeping or waking, crying barely, because she isn't strong enough to breathe properly, and her hair lies damp and tangled with sweat. She is three years old. My brother is twenty-seven years old.

The other sick children in the room beside theirs, children of servants of the household, or of anyone too poor to have the firewood to keep the cold off them, but they die in the end, all of them, or nearly. Rían is with them now; we have been lending our aid in turn; she is Morwen's kinswoman and younger than I am. She would be gentle if not for how she looks at me across the beds, as if she has some madness in her, locked away, shining in her eyes, as if she's always just one death away from losing herself. She smiled at me. I think the same madness is there in my eyes. I'm the mad person who went to Gondolin, after all, not that anybody knows, or that most could guess it, but they know that I have something akin to but different than their blank despair, because I have a memory of a dream of a world where the Enemy doesn't exist. Gondolin is a rumor or a legend or a dream. No one goes into Gondolin and certainly no one ever comes back. Gondolin is beautiful; there no one suffers and no one dies. Húrin keeps the city on the hill in his mind's eye and it gives him strength or courage, and he can see a Dor- lómin free of the evil workings of the Enemy. But Gondolin drives me mad.

I've seen your strength, your wisdom; your place where there is no hurt. I know that it exists. _But you do nothing_. While my brother labors here you live in peace. If your gates could open to us, would we be safe? Would I have to watch my brother's children be murdered by Morgoth? But you _can't_, no more than Húrin can do anything but offer what empty comfort he can to the young woman, the girl who cannot be more than twenty, and send her to Morwen, to have some soup and weep helplessly. Tomorrow he will help her bury the child. Maybe he will bury his son as well, or his daughter. He couldn't do anything but this. He can't stand by and watch people suffer at Morgoth's hands and not do anything, and not try to help them.

You can't help us. You've made yourself that way. Because if you _let us in_ eventually the spies of the Dark Enemy would find your hidden stronghold, and destroy it. And what use would it be then? What blow would you have stricken against the Enemy? Gondolin cannot answer the cries of Dor-lómin or she would not be Gondolin.

But how do you live with your golden-haired daughter and your laughter and your wisdom while Dor-lómin is torn apart and while within our own halls laughter is dying in pain?

Someday that sort of pain will have to matter to you the way it does to us. It must be easy when you don't know, when you're so far removed. I will never send this letter. As soon as I finish it I will crumple it and throw it into the sickroom fire and go back to doing whatever is needed here. Fires, cloths and boiled water and steeped leaves made into medicines as useless as my help. As useless as your help.

I almost hate myself for almost wishing that I never left Gondolin and the music of the fountains and the carelessness, that I never left the place where you never have to know about these horrors. You can make the horrors not exist in your mind, but they're still real. Maybe I will go watch my nephew die while I try to save him.

I am not as strong or steadfast as Húrin and I cannot lead the endless fight as he can, but if there's one thing I _can't_ do it is abandon my brother or his wife or his children now. Even if there's nothing else to do there's that loyalty and love. Enough to force myself to see the suffering and watch hope slip through my fingers like dust.

You said you wanted to keep us in Gondolin because you loved us. Do you love us enough to take on yourself some part of what we face so that we do not face it alone? Do you think that if you let Morgoth decimate us you will stay safe forever, or that you will weaken him by letting the allies of the Eldar die as you live in your tranquility?

Ever I am the loyal servant of Gondolin. When she stands against the Enemy. And I don't even need to sign my name in the letters of lore I learned within her walls, I can just burn it and let the ash slip though my fingers –


End file.
